There are a lot of buffs and debuffs in Destiny. Rifts, Wells, and Weapons of Light is back, Melting Point, Flawless Executioner, Shadowshot, Tractor Cannon. So, what stacks with what? That’s what I’ll be showing you guys today, similar to how I did it for Destiny 1. Spoilers, it’s essentially the same. We’re going to start with the Warlock, who has the most tools to buff your team, Empowering Rift for starters and new with Forsaken, Guiding Flame Empowered Melee and Well of Radiance. Individually, Empowering Rift is a 25% boost to weapon damage, Empowered Melee is also 25%, while Well of Radiance is a 35% increase. So where do things stack? The only thing that stacks together here is Well of Radiance and the Empowered Melee. You can not drop an Empowering Rift inside of a Well.

You also can’t stack the Empowered Melee on an Empowering Rift. If you have the empowered buff and step into an empowering rift, the game will just rip the buff right off of you and give you empowering rift instead. The effects of stacking Well of Radiance and Empowered melee are multiplicative, not additive. That means it’s not just 35% and 25% added together, rather the effects are multiplied, resulting in a gain of 68.7% weapon damage when those are stacked. For fun, let’s throw a debuff into the mix, where we now have Tractor Cannon. Tractor Cannon on its own debuffs an enemy to take 50% more void damage for a brief time, while arc and solar damage are increased by 33%. Let’s try Well of Radiance, with an empowered melee AND Tractor cannon and yeah, that’s a big increase in damage. We went from 8310 damage on a hand cannon shot, to 18,692. That is a 125% increase with those 3 effects applied.

What about Weapons of Light? Yes, it is back, giving a 25% damage increase to your team. The only difference is that you need to have someone hold their shield up for the damage increase. Is that worth it? We’ll talk about it in a video coming soon. Anyway, Weapons of Light, what does it stack with? Well of Radiance? Yup. Well of Radiance and Empowered melee? Also yup. We go from 1370 per shot, to 2889, a 111% increase in damage, and that’s without a debuff either, on a kinetic weapon. There is also another buff on the new Striker Titan, inertia override, where you gain a 20% damage buff after sliding into ammo, the buff is for that weapon type. While this technically exists, in a raid setting, this is far too conditional of a buff for a raid setting to ever really need to watch out for. In a strike setting, you’ll see it a little bit, but with the value that Sentinel and Sunbreaker bring in terms of their buffs and debuffs in the raid, I think use of this buff will be uncommon. Let’s talk debuffs, because not all of them play nice, in fact none of them play nice with each other.

There are 2 categories of debuffs: damage debuffs and supression debuffs. Supression debuffs are things like Tractor Cannon, Shadowshot and to a much lesser extent, Suppression Grenade. Shadowshot increases damage taken by 35%. Then you have your pure damage debuffs, which are Melting Point, also known as Hammer Strike in Destiny 2, it was called Melting Point in Destiny 1, and Flawless Executioner, new with Forsaken. Melting Point and Flawless Execution both place a debuff on a target that causes them to take 50% increased damage for a brief time. Melting Point has a bit easier application process, but Flawless Executioner can be done without the need of an ability cooldown. HOWEVER, much like it was in D1, you can’t just stack all of these debuffs and blow something up. Certain debuffs get priority over others.

For example: Melting Point and Shadowshot do not stack. Shadowshot will overtake Melting Point probably due to its suppression effect, which the game values as stronger. While this is fine for large groups of enemies, against bosses individually, you should let Melting Point be applied first if available. Flawless Executioner is essentially the same as Melting Point and is also overwritten by Shadowshot. Tractor Cannon will also overwrite Melting Point and Flawless Executioner, even though it only gives a 33% damage boost to arc and solar damage.

Basically: an enemy can only have 1 debuff applied to it at a time. If you’re fighting a boss, Melting Point or Flawless Executioner should be the priority on the boss. Tractor Cannon takes someone out of the fight in terms of DPS similar to Weapons of Light and yes, we will also cover if it is worth having a Tractor Cannon around in a follow up video. That is… approximately all you need to know about buffs and debuffs, again, pretty similar to Destiny 1, where you can stack a lot of individual buffs on your character, but debuffs are limited to 1 at a time and suppression debuffs will take priority over damage debuffs. Thanks for watching, I’ll see you next time.